Perspectives from a Youth marketing strategist

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Sprite ‘Step Off’ competition

Sprite USA are tapping into the dance trend and have recently launched a nationwide ‘STEP OFF’ dance competition pitting collegs kids around the USA against each other. It’s for frat kids and sorority girls. ‘Stepping’ is a dance form which is all about footwork, it’s massive in the college scene, and is kind of like a fusion between marching, hop hop and street. Will be interesting to see which dance/street tribes get involved in this and whether the universal language of dance means it will involve black, white, hispanic, asian kids. They’ve created a national competition, with over 30 events around the USA, 4 rounds of qualifying and over $1.5m in prizes. The interesting thing with the prize pool is that the winners will get scholarship grants as opposed to straight out cash, which is great. There is a social media presence, the Facebook fan page only has 2,674 fans so far, which isn’t great, but I imagine this will swell quickly. Just goes to show, if you don’t seed an idea quickly within the right tribe, your idea can fall over. Sprite aren’t creating culture like Red Bull does by creating a new art form, but they are tapping into an emerging trend in freestyle street dance culture and giving teens and 20somethings a platform to express themselves and compete, which is great. Will be interesting to see the uptake of this competition, but if ‘If you think you can dance’ is anything to go by, we could be in for some very cool freestyle dancing.